The game ran fine... except I wasn't able to save outside of the tutorial area. No big deal I thought, but it turns out no matter what every game I start has the same problem.

I then removed my mods, reverted back to my original data folder, updated every driver I could think of, made every exe file related to new vegas run in windows xp service pack 3 compatibility mode, made sure my saved games folder was not set to read-only and even changed my fallout.ini file because the internet said sometimes the game has problems on multi-core systems. And I tried a combination of the above as well as all of them at once.

But still my game literally cannot save without Fallout New Vegas crashing... outside of the tutorial area. It's the weirdest crash I've ever received because the instant I click "No I don't want to edit my character and move on" I cannot save my game. Every new game I create has this problem... plus my original play through that easily had 500 saves with no problems what so ever.